I am truly shocked that you seem to lack faith in our Beloved Leader, The Chosen One. After his many long years in the US Senate he must be very experienced in the nature of treaties. His Secretary of State also had many years of experience in foreign policy prior to her term in the Senate. Such lack of faith could make Minitrue lead the Thoughtpolice to your door.

I never read the treaty but I suspect that puts me in the same league as the senators who voted for it. The moment the big rush-rush push to ratify it started I knew it was like Obamacare, something he wanted passed before anyone could look at it and think about it. People should not know what is in their laws, remember, "Ignorance is Strength"

Our British friends complain about Blair and Brown, the Lisbon treaty and the repeal of Magna Carta by them. This lot may be worse.

I am truly shocked that you seem to lack faith in our Beloved Leader, The Chosen One. After his many long years in the US Senate he must be very experienced in the nature of treaties. His Secretary of State also had many years of experience in foreign policy prior to her term in the Senate. Such lack of faith could make Minitrue lead the Thoughtpolice to your door.

I never read the treaty but I suspect that puts me in the same league as the senators who voted for it. The moment the big rush-rush push to ratify it started I knew it was like Obamacare, something he wanted passed before anyone could look at it and think about it. People should not know what is in their laws, remember, "Ignorance is Strength"

Our British friends complain about Blair and Brown, the Lisbon treaty and the repeal of Magna Carta by them. This lot may be worse.

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But David, our Master (and Nobel laureate) was sorely in need of an uptick in His media coverage before the holiday Congessional break since his stock plummeted after the by-election and before the new bunch are sworn in.

Thus we had in short order (i have still not figured out the crises that demanded the shameful rush to pass the DADT repeal, the START debacle and the so-called "food safety" law. Surely it was not to take unprecedented advantage of the lame duck session just to give Him a nice headline as He winged His way to sunnier climes to have quality family time (apparently by Twitter since he was forcing Himself to squeeze some golf in.

If you would like a bit more confirmation of the propaganda arm of our current Masters that purports to be our traditional information sources, get a long sheet of paper and scan the headlines and sound bites to see how many times the words "rebound," "renewed strength" etc. are used. One might almost think there was a little "coordination" among those sources where their ideological views overrode any sense of competition as the UK media still enjoys, much less any inconveniet journalistic "ethics."

Thats the problem with dumming down your population in order to have a cheap workforce. They eventually elect a dummed down candidate. Putin, however, is as clever as a skip full of monkeys and is not hamstrung by religious trivia or the dogma of political correctness.

Read "The Prince" by Machievelli, you won't find it lying amongst the marvel comics, but it's all in there and Putin has read it, as have the Chinese.

Defence against nuclear attack is a crock anyway, a dangerous one in that people may imagine nuclear war is winnable and thus be more willing to risk one. A dangerous snare and a vast waste of resources better spent on conventional forces, or, if you're Obama, health care legislation.

This is only a surprise if you are an idiot or ignorant of what START is all about. The whole idea behind it is to reduce the number of nukes, one way to do this is to reduce defences against them. That's why the Russians have only one (now ageing and of debatable effectiveness) ABM system around Moscow, the US deployed Safeguard/Sprint but shut it down fairly quickly.

There is also a good deal of (possibly deliberate) confusion on the detail. Current US missile defences are capable of stopping 1950's vintage Scud derivatives and the like, as fielded by NK and Iran - IRBMs at best, depending on your terminology. Stopping modern strategic missiles is a whole other ball game and I would expect the Russians to consider defences against those limited by the treaty. I would not expect them to consider defences against tactical / intermediate missiles limited, as that would mean scrapping most of their modern high end SAMs which counter this threat.

It's also worth considering that modern tactical and intermediate missiles are significantly more capable than those US systems are designed to counter. If you remember the fuss around US deployments into eastern europe in support of the "missile shield", the Russians made it quite clear that their counter would be a few Brigades of modern tactical missiles to clear out the facilities on day 1 should anything kick off. These use such interesting techniques as depressed trajectories and manoeuvering warheads and would be far more difficult to counter.

And that comes back to why START is a good idea. Should the US deploy an ABM system proof against strategic missiles it is relatively easy for the Russians to build more. Should they bin the existing agreements on number of warheads per missile then the number of incoming warheads will increase. Bear in mind that you then need 1 or more interceptors per warhead, not per missile, add in decoys and so on and it is clear that the cost to the US will be huge.

This of course why the US binned their ABM system shortly after deploying the first elements, and why - before the need to attack Obama in any way possible - START enjoyed cross-party support in the US.

I doubt Vlad "the Impaler" Putin ever made a dumb move in his life. This is'nt Rocky IV; in real life it's the muscular Russian killing machine who wins.

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I'd love to see that, Obama versus Putin in a no rules cage fight, Sara Palin and that Ukrainian tart who's just been kicked into touch could provide the eyeball candy and mop up all the blood, the winner gets a fifteen minute button push headstart to Armageddon.

I'd love to see that, Obama versus Putin in a no rules cage fight, Sara Palin and that Ukrainian tart who's just been kicked into touch could provide the eyeball candy and mop up all the blood, the winner gets a fifteen minute button push headstart to Armageddon.

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Hmmm...an ex-KGB agent with a 6th Dan Black Belt in Judo versus a skinny bloke with no military service who's idea of exercise is to play Basketball?

Putin is the Dark Tsar; the Russian version of Batman. He'd tear Obama's head off and stump-fcuk the corpse.

Does Russia think the US will not throw the bomb first just because they didn't during the Cold War? I think Obama is a wee toughy who may have a list of countries to nuke/keep in order. As soon as he feels obliged to strike one, he will do the lot at the same time. Business opportunities during the reconstruction period might make it even more attractive.

Does Russia think the US will not throw the bomb first just because they didn't during the Cold War? I think Obama is a wee toughy who may have a list of countries to nuke/keep in order. As soon as he feels obliged to strike one, he will do the lot at the same time. Business opportunities during the reconstruction period might make it even more attractive

Edited for seasonal grammar.

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No, he's just Tony Blair with a really good suntan; all style and no fcuking substance.

Did anyone seriously expect the Russians to change their tune and "reset" relations. Putin's ex-KGB FFS.

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Which should make them easy to deal with! FFS we know what they want - control of European energy supplies being high on the list. Just because there is an ambush doesn't mean you have to walk into it.